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I've had good luck (recently) with drivers on Linux. By recently I mean in the last 4 - 5 years. Before that, yeah, it was very hit or miss. Last time I connected a new printer to my home network (Epson, a name brand) introducing it to Ubuntu took a few mouse clicks and it pulled down the driver from the net and was ready in less than 2 min or so. The (at that time) Win XP system needed the driver disk and lots of fumbling around to get it to recognize it. My wife's Mac (OS/X) still "loses" the handle on the printer from time to time and you have to delete it and re-install it all over again via a procedure that is the worst of the 3 systems. (manually enter raw IP addresses, guesses at queue names, then go and find a driver for it, etc.)

As for the UIs. Between work and home I end up using XP, Win7, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. Red Hat has KDE 3.x, Ubuntu was Gnome 2.x based until the Unity fiasco started. :-( Honestly, they're all pretty good UIs IMHO, some differences, but none stand out as being really great compared to the others. Unity is the most different, buggiest, and worst of the lot. Like I said, bad enough I'm going to switch OSes for no other reason than that. I could slap Gnome or KDE or another window manager on Ubuntu, but I'm just lazy enough to want to run my distro "out of the box" plus it is as good of an excuse as any to fool with Mepis again and a KDE 4.x UI, see how that works. Yes, I realize those reasons are somewhat contradictory. ;-)